AuthorTopic: What irks me about AA (Read 7099 times)

is that I'm not receiving it. Applying for law school is stressful, both in choosing a school, and then looking at the financial costs of it, and it does make me very jealous when I see an URM with similar scores as me get into better schools and offered more money than me. I can agree with part of the premise, that it's an attempt to right the wrong of 200 years of slavery, but what I can't sign onto the justification that it's a response to current racism. Furthermore, many of the beneficiaries are middle-class through and through, in which case they haven't suffered economically. I mean, we all get hard knocks in life, and so I find the justification of AA for middle-class blacks to be exceedingly thin.

Of course, AA for legacies is probably worse (just look at Dubya). But inequity is not a reason to encourage more inequity.

I do agree that someone coming from the inner city should be given a leg up... so I would agree with something along the lines of class-based AA. I also realize that making it race-based is... the easiest way to go. So yes, be cynical. But one does have to agree that there are people who will lose opportunities due to AA, just as some people will gain opportunities.

you have never experienced racism (I'm assuming you're white), so you don't know what it's like.

That is a stupid assumption. I'm white and have been discriminated against many times. Racists are not just white, they are from all ethnicities. Just because whites are the majority in the U.S. (barely) doesn't mean that they are the majority where they live, work, or go to school.

1. I have seen people on this board (and especially xoxo) complain about the dumb-instaters "ruining" public schools.

2. That person or his/her family is paying taxes in that state, and part of that school's function is to serve the needs of the state. Yes, I understand that the top public law schools get little of their funding from the government.

To the OP:

I totally understand where you are coming from, because it *is* hard to see someone with lower numbers than yours getting in somewhere you were rejected or getting larger scholarships. It's hard not to be envious any time it happens, whether the other person is a URM or not. But at the same time, I really appreciate having a diverse set of colleagues, and I don't see another way for schools to accomplish it. Some ethnic groups really *are* underrepresented, and schools are battling for them.

I find the in-state advantage to be ridiculous as well. Not all of us come from states with nationally renown law schools, and yes, that brings another element of randomness into it. Furthermore... the diversity that AA brings in is literally only skin-deep. Yes, in any school that I go to, I want to see a wide range of personalities, and unless personality were somehow tied to skin color...

I don't know. I'm looking for more than diversity in personality. I think cultural diversity and diversity of experience is important, too. And I do believe that many or even most (but definitely not all) URMs really have come from different backgrounds than most law school students. And I'm not really talking socio-economically... I'm talking about culture and perspective.

I mean, trust me, I'm for ALL KINDS of diversity... I definitely tried to play up my own diversity of experiences and perspectives in my application essays.

I really am of two minds on AA. When I look at individual situations, I definitely find ones that seem unfair. But when I look at it on a larger scale, I see some merits.

Well, for instance, as the last Supreme Court case revealed, UMich simply added 20 points on virtue of being a URM. That is a bonus for nothing other than skin color. I can find a degree of justification for advantages given for being in-state (tax-payers provide a big chunk of funding to the school), athletics (for one, you have to work at being an athlete, it demonstrates character and it sells basketball tickets), even legacies (the guy's dad did give a million bucks or whatever). I can agree on the reparations argument. I can't agree for the sake of diversity (again, because skin color does not determine personality), or to compensate for assumed racism in the system.

I would like someone already in this thread to explain to me why you aren't irked by the in-stater advantage in law school admissions.

In-staters are given a large bump, they take very many more spots than race-based AA, they're given a huge tuition subsidy.

If it weren't for in-staters, approximately 3x as many out-of-state with better numbers [i.e. "more qualified" in the usual parlance] would attend schools like Texas, Michigan, North Carolina, and Minnesota.

And yet I never hear a word of complaint about that unearned advantage. What I do hear is a great deal of complaining about race-based AA, which takes up perhaps 5% of the spots at one of these schools rather than the 50, 60, 80% that the in-stater AA programs take up.

I never hear a peep of complaint about the tuition subsidy that automatically accrues to admitted in-staters, even though the difference in tuition between out-of-staters and in-staters is enormous.

I never hear any suggestion that Texans at UT, for example, are dumber, less educated, etc, or that students at UT should be skeptical of the in-state student population's right to be there.

I don't hear these complaints from libertarians, I don't hear it from the LSAT whores, I don't here it from anyone.

Why not?

Think about it a little before posting a response.

What a stupid comparison. States seeking to educate their own citizens versus someone getting a bump for being born a certain color. Sounds like you should be doing the thinking before posting.